{"id":147844,"date":"2025-02-06T18:00:19","date_gmt":"2025-02-07T01:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=147844"},"modified":"2025-02-06T18:01:08","modified_gmt":"2025-02-07T01:01:08","slug":"sri-lanka-facades-of-independence-and-masks-of-conquest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2025\/02\/06\/sri-lanka-facades-of-independence-and-masks-of-conquest\/","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka: Facades of Independence and Masks of Conquest – Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake* InDepthNews<\/a>2025-02-03<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

Of \u2018GLADIO\u2019 Operations, Raj Nostalgia History and Literary Festivals<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka | 3 February 2025 (IDN) \u2014 Independence has been a long mirage in Ceylon \/ Sri Lanka, where history seems to repeat itself as tragedy and farce in equal measure. This week, the geostrategic Indian Ocean island is set to mark 77 years of faux Independence from the British Raj. There will be much pomp and pageantry to mask the fact that the country is caught in a neocolonial Eurobond US dollar debt trap and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout business at this time. It\u2019s crucial to understand these ongoing neocolonial issues to grasp the current situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The island effectively lost economic sovereignty to the Lender of Last Resorts amid a staged Sovereign Default to Eurobond holders of the colonial Club de Paris and the Club of London bankers and bondholders and hedge fund managers, three years ago, in 2022, on the eve of its purported 75th Independence Day celebration. This loss of economic sovereignty is a pressing issue that should concern us all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year, 4 February, Independence Day, will be marked with great pomp. Eighty million rupees have been allocated for the fanfare and ceremony. Preparatory work, including security detail for the political elite and diplomat corps, has been ongoing for months at Independence Square in Cinnamon Gardens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year\u2019s hollow celebration of 77 years of Independence would bear an eerie semblance to its first Independence Day when the famous \u2018Pageant of Ceylon\u2019 was staged on 4 February 1948. That was when the British Crown Colony of Ceylon morphed into a \u2018British Dominion\u2019\u2014sans genuine Independence. After all, London still controlled the strategic Indian Ocean island\u2019s ports, airports, plantations, justice and court system. The Queen of England appointed the island\u2019s ceremonial head of state, the Governor General.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ceylon\u2019s Independence on 4 February 1948 was enacted for bemused natives, sans much sovereignty or the Right to Self-determination of colonized peoples, and never mind the question of territorial integrity. The deepsea Trincomalee harbour was still home to the Royal Navy\u2019s Eastern Command until 1958, when Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike nationalized it. He was assassinated in September 1959. Nor was the United Nations Charter\u2019s Article 2.7 affirmation on interventions within \u2018the domestic jurisdiction of States\u2019 on the Independence agenda in 1948.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The British then moved to the Indian Ocean Chagos Islands, drove out its people in the early sixties to set up the US-UK Diego Garcia military base, which the International Court of Justice ruled in 2019 was illegal under International Law.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in Colombo, the colourful Independence Pageant of Ceylon that converted the British Crown Colony of Ceylon into a \u2018British Dominion\u2019 on 4 February 1948 was a fa\u00e7ade. The ceremonial served to mask and camouflage with colourful cultural traditions, spectacular dances, pomp and circumstance the fact that London still held substantial power and effectively controlled the Parliament of Ceylon, where much of the debate was scripted in London, as much as by the colonial comprador elite, literati and glitterati present at the independence show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Real Independence in 1972<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the Whig imperial historian Sir John Seeley, who famously remarked that the British Empire happened in a fit of absence of mind\u201d was right after all!The British empire seemed to exist in suspended animation in Ceylon long after its official Independence in 1948, with clandestine GLADIO-style \u2018Stay Behind\u2019 secret service operations, to deliver shocks and destabilize the county– like the assassination of Socialist Prime Minister Bandaranaike in 1959.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Swiss historian Daniele Ganser has detailed many GLADIO operations in his book NATO\u2019s Secret Armies\u201d, which are in some ways comparable to the current Sword of Damocles suspended over the natives of Paradise Lost in the form of the Eurobond debt trap that has debilitated the country\u2019s economic sovereignty and eroded its territorial integrity at this time, also with cyber operations and the assassination of Dinesh Shaftter, the primary witness in the Court Case against former President Wickramasinghe in the Central Bank Bond scam case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arguably, that first Independence Day ceremony on a bright February morning in 1948 in Ceylon masked yet another face and phase of (neo)colonialism on the island. Indeed, it was the world\u2019s first woman head of State, Socialist Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who delivered a modicum of genuine Independence to Ceylon\/ Sri Lanka on 22 May 1972, nearly 25 years after the faux Independence \u2018Pageant of Ceylon\u2019 that rendered the country a British Dominion\u201d on 4 February 1948.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sri Lanka became a Republic in 1972 amid much nay-saying by the colonial comprador bourgeois\u2019 brown sahibs and memsahibs, invested in the colonial economy, and remarkably after the abortive 1971 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection. The county adopted its first Republican Constitution, and its name was changed to Sri Lanka from the colonial Ceylon as part of becoming independent. By then, all the ports and airports, plantations and energy companies had been or were being nationalized, a process that was later sabotaged as in other Afro-Asian neo-colonies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first Socialist Prime Minister, SWRD Bandaranaike, assassinated in Operation Colombo in 1959, paid the highest price for nationalizing the geostrategic island\u2019s Trincomalee and other ports, particularly Galle and Colombo, all of which remain the focus of big power competition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless, the week of Sri Lanka\u2019s purported 77th Independence show will progress with little talk about the meaning of independence, sovereignty, the self-determination of peoples of the Global South, or neocolonialism. There will be no mention of the country\u2019s recent patent loss of economic sovereignty to the IMF, and the staged impoverishment of its people due to rapid local currency depreciation against the exorbitantly privileged US dollar, or the just concluded odious debt Eurobond exchange to benefit unnamed Eurobond holders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sri Lanka\u2019s purported 77th Independence Day will be another ceremony, a welcome holiday, bread and circuses for an Anglophile elite and the vernacular masses alike. The pomp and pageantry would no doubt gloss over a darker reality, the peoples\u2019 impoverishment and the \u2018pumping and dumping\u2019 of the country with various exogenous economic shocks, including mysterious Islamic State (ISIS) claimed terror attacks in 2019 to Make the Economy Scream\u201d, during the long march to real Independence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With all its pageantry and pomp, Independence Day would be once again more or less irrelevant, much like the recently concluded second edition of the Raj Nostalgia, Ceylon Literary Festival (CLF), held at the Colombo Public Library.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CLF\u2019s organizers and sponsors preferred the colonial appellation \u2018Ceylon\u2019 to the more Independent Sri Lanka. There was no talk at the CLF about Eurobond debt neocolonialism, the new Cold War in South Asia or regime change operations amid hybrid war operations in the Asian 21st<\/sup> Century\u201d that is set to make Euro-America irrelevant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was also no mention of ongoing tectonic geopolitical power shifts across the Indian Ocean and to the Global South, or the rise of the BRICS at the CLF. Of course, the CLF\u2019s principal sponsor was the London-headquartered Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, one of the beneficiaries of Sri Lanka\u2019s USD-Euro bondage and related derivatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ceylon\/ Sri Lanka\u2019s natives, rulers and historians, left and right including funded think tanks and NGOs, alike seemed to suffer from amnesia\u2013 perhaps, a sign of the \u2018colonial condition\u2019 analyzed by sociologists and psychologists including Ashis Nandy in his book Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism\u201d. Meanwhile, WOKE history and identity politics mask continuing structures, systems and institutional logics of neo-colonial Eurodollar debt bondage and bonded labour, including new forms of indentured and migrant labour.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

TO BE CONTINUED<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake* InDepthNews2025-02-03 Of \u2018GLADIO\u2019 Operations, Raj Nostalgia History and Literary Festivals COLOMBO, Sri Lanka | 3 February 2025 (IDN) \u2014 Independence has been a long mirage in Ceylon \/ Sri Lanka, where history seems to repeat itself as tragedy and farce in equal measure. This week, the geostrategic Indian Ocean island is set […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,189],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-darini-rajasingham-senanayake","category-189"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}